The Improbable Rise of J. D. Vance
On a warm, gray morning in mid-September, a small group of reporters waited under the wing of a plane at a private terminal at Ronald Reagan National Airport, anticipating the arrival of the Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance. Earlier in the week, a would-be assassin had tried to ambush Donald Trump on his golf course in West Palm Beach, the second attempt on Trump’s life this summer, and the apparatus accompanying Vance had the feel of an armed brigade. The travelling party included a dozen staffers and about the same number of Secret Service officers. When Vance’s motorcade pulled up to Trump Force Two—a Boeing 737 with the names of anonymous donors (Edward M., Victoria W.) painted on the tail fin—it contained twelve cars. In the only other political campaign that Vance had run, for the United States Senate, in 2022, he had ridden to events in an aide’s old Subaru. Now he and his wife, Usha, accompanied by their ten-month-old dog, Atlas, emerged from a long black Suburban, both trim and elegantly dressed for the campaign trail.
Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate had punctuated an astounding rise. Born in the small manufacturing city of Middletown, Ohio, he was raised by a drug-addicted mother and his beloved Appalachian-born grandmother, Mamaw. He worked his way up through storied American institutions: the Marine Corps, Yale Law School, Silicon Valley. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the best-selling memoir Vance published in 2016, made him famous, and his denunciations of Trump as “cultural heroin” for the white working class even more so. A few years later, he was a senator from Ohio, the Republican Party’s most effective spokesman for Trumpism as an ideology, and—both improbably and inevitably—the Vice-Presidential nominee. “If you think about where he came from and where he is, at forty years old,” the conservative analyst Yuval Levin, a Vance ally, said, “J.D. is the single most successful member of his generation in American politics.”
At Yale Law School, where the Vances met, Usha, who had been a Yale undergraduate, operated as an interpreter of Ivy League folkways for the rougher-hewn J.D. She kept a spreadsheet of things she thought he should try, a mutual friend of theirs recalled—“I remember one of them was Greek yogurt.” Vance talked with another friend about becoming a househusband; he had not had a father, and it was important to him to become a good one. (In an echo of Bill Clinton’s experience, Vance used the last name of a stepfather, Hamel, until after college.) But, as he began to consider a political career, it was Usha, a former clerk to two Supreme Court Justices, who moved to Ohio. When he joined Trump’s ticket, she left her job at a prestigious law firm. At this year’s Republican National Convention, Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, sat next to Trump as her husband said that “America is not just an idea” but a people bound by a “shared history.” The scene would have been unimaginable to many of her friends just a few months earlier. “I’m not sure what deal J.D. made with Usha,” a person close to the couple told me. “But it had to be something, because they make every decision together.”
Vance, too, had only recently made a full accommodation with Trump. A longtime political adviser to Vance told me, “The problem that J.D. had always been trying to solve is what to do about the decline of the Midwest.” Many of his prior solutions, the adviser went on, had simply not worked. “Hillbilly Elegy” had been, in part, an attempt to make liberal readers sensitive to the plight and the anger of rural whites. Vance’s subsequent efforts to establish an addiction-treatment nonprofit in Ohio and a heartland-focussed venture-capital fund were, in this view, intended to rebuild the Midwest from within. Vance’s partnership with Trump, whom he once derided, represented his shift to a more tribal politics. Remember, the adviser said, even in Vance’s Never Trump days he hadn’t really opposed Trump on policy: “His objection was that he thought Trump didn’t mean anything he said.”
But this theory is complicated by how perfectly Vance’s rightward turn has tracked the fixations of conservative activists and élites. His rise has been backed by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, Jr., whose complaints about woke politics and tech censorship Vance has amplified on the trail. In the view of one of his old friends, Vance, in becoming a national figure, has also become more thin-skinned, not unlike many of the tech titans who support him. Some commentary on Vance’s political transformation after the 2020 election identified the beard he had started to grow as a symbol of his newly bristling politics. But at least as noticeable is the weight he’s lost and the fitted suits he now wears. Such a change isn’t unusual for powerful people in the Ozempic era, but it also suggests the ways in which Vance, who positions himself as an enemy of the élite, is still a part of it.
On the tarmac, Vance let Usha board the plane first and then lumbered up the stairs, somewhat more in the manner of his dog than of his wife. He turned to the cameras and let his right hand vibrate in a quick tremor of a wave. He was making two stops that day, first in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a long-standing conservative bastion where Democrats had lately made inroads, and then in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. More than one of Vance’s advisers told me that his selection as the Vice-Presidential candidate had depended partly on poll numbers in July, which had suggested that Joe Biden posed a bigger threat in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin than in the Sun Belt states. Had the Democrats been stronger in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, the advisers thought, the Florida senator Marco Rubio might have been the pick.
But, even if Vance was an emblem of the Midwest, he was also a drag on the ticket, significantly less popular than his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. The stances Vance had taken that endeared him to the conservative base—his support for a national abortion ban and his association with Project 2025, the think-tank initiative to weaponize the federal government for right-wing causes, which Vance had once termed “de-Baathification”—were so toxic to the general electorate that Trump had disavowed them, and then Vance had, too. The question of what kind of populism would follow Trump into office, should he win, was entangled with the question of what kind of populist his chosen political heir is: a tireless representative of the alienated Midwest, or—like Thiel and Musk, who urged Trump to pick Vance in the first place—a rich, very online man, motivated by a sweeping rejection of progressive culture? Vance disappeared through the door of Trump Force Two, and within a few minutes he was up and away, soaring high above Arlington National Cemetery. The Republican Vice-Presidential candidate was headed someplace like home.
On a Friday morning at the end of September, before the start of the school day, I drove to a slightly oversized house just outside Cincinnati to meet Vance’s old physics teacher, Christopher Tape. Of all the people I interviewed—Vance’s advisers, political allies, co-ideologues, and law-school friends among them—Tape had seemed the most eager to meet with me, perhaps because his enthusiasm for Vance runs the purest. “A phenomenal learner,” Tape said. “And always such a jovial, friendly kid.”
Not every student at Middletown High School was poor—some, especially those who lived closer to the interstate, had parents who worked in Cincinnati or Dayton—but many were, and Tape tended to be circumspect when he asked students about their future. But one day, during Vance’s senior year, Tape inquired about his star student’s post-graduation plans. “And J.D. says, ‘Oh, I’m going to the Marines,’ ” Tape told me. “I was, like, ‘Oh, R.O.T.C.?’ And he went, ‘No, I’m enlisting.’ And I was stunned. Like, dude, you can write your ticket. And he says—I’ll never forget this—‘I love this country. And I talk about it a lot. But, if I don’t do anything about it, it’s just talk.’ ”
“I’m just trying to get through the rest of my life without buying another umbrella.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance relays how he had emerged from a highly chaotic childhood—in one scene, a twelve-year-old Vance dashes out of a car on the shoulder of a highway after his mother threatens to kill them both in a crash—with a desire for order, which he found in the Marines. He was deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2005, where he worked in public affairs—shepherding visiting journalists and writing articles for the military press. “He wasn’t kicking down doors,” as the former congressman Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who supports Kamala Harris, said earlier this summer, but he was working in a very dangerous place. A senior officer in his division was killed by a roadside bomb in Ramadi, while escorting journalists from Newsweek. Cullen Tiernan, Vance’s best friend in the Corps, with whom he trained Stateside, recalled that Vance was more politically engaged than most marines. “When Dick Cheney visited,” Tiernan told me, “J.D. was the only person who was excited.” But he was also attuned to the darker aspects of the invasion. “There’s civilian contractors that are getting paid six times as much as you, just to supervise third-party nationals. Halliburton and KBR are having a feast of war,” Tiernan said. “Those were things we discussed and were disenchanting.”
Vance earned a degree from Ohio State University, then entered Yale Law School in the fall of 2010, the same year as the former Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. If Yale offered an established track for ambitious young conservatives, it could also make a kid from the sticks feel less assured. Ninety-five per cent of the school’s student body at the time came from upper-middle-class backgrounds, and many were obviously wealthy. “Your classmates are the coddled children of hospital administrators and faculty members and corporate lawyers,” the longtime adviser, who finished Yale the same year as Vance, told me. “They ain’t like you, and there’s just whole swaths of existence that seem foreign to them.” Vance had “heard through the grapevine” that a professor who had criticized his work thought that the law school should only accept students from élite private institutions, because students from public schools needed “remedial education.” “I have never felt out of place in my entire life,” he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy.” “But I did at Yale.”
